An Embarrassment of Riches

So, we had the Special Interest Group this afternoon. This is our sort of annual business meeting.

In November, we talk about potential changes for the next year and set our topics.

In December, we have a fun topic, but this time we’re going to do a Kinky Gift Exchange.

It’s a game you may well have played at an office party or family gathering. You bring a wrapped present, in this case something under $10. If there are 20 people there, you write the numbers one through 20 on pieces of paper, and each person chooses a number.

The person who draws number 1 picks a package and opens it. Person 2 then has a choice to take the item that Person 1 has, or open a different package.

If he takes one of the previously opened gifts, then the person whose gift has been “stolen,” can choose to steal a gift from anyone save the person who has stolen the gift from then, or opening a package.

And so on, to the end. It’s a game in which later number are really better than earlier, but it can be quite amusing when you have a few gifts that everyone wants, or something that one or two people REALLY want.

So, we’ll do that next month, then start the whole thing again in January.

It was a smallish group, probably because next week is the holiday and lots of people will take off this week to visit family, or the holiday festivities are just beginning. aisha, one of my favorite people, was there, and Cerrin and Charles and jacki and Cuffs and Joy and Fred and Sarah and Caile and some other folks as well.

Usually we have some social time but this is the one time in the year when we have business, so I was doing almost all of the talking.

We talked about maintaining D/s dynamics, the first time we’ve talked about that, and while it had value I need to tweak it. It had little for single people, or people who were kind of new to it, it’s hard to maintain what you don’t have or are still growing.

I got, I think, the biggest laugh when I said that my concern with slave drew being the one to pull the plug because, knowing him, he’d say, “She’s probably going to die anyway, and look at all the electricity she’s using!”

While yanking the plug.

I believe aisha nearly choked on that one.

As I’ve said a lot of times before, we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of community in this area. We have more things to do than you can do, sometimes in a literal sense and always in the sense of having enough energy/time/money to do them all.

It’s not egotism to say that the kink community in Louisville most certainly and even, to some extent, bears much of my mark. I mean, I founded the munch which really kind of founded the community as a whole. I came in early on the wave from the Internet that brought in so many people, and I was always able to ride the storm, to continue the metaphor, even when it was stormy seas.

In any case, I have genuinely never seen “competing” groups as being competing, not really. We have a newish Club FEM group – it’s been around a couple years, maybe a bit more, but I think with some fits and starts, we formed a MAsT chapter here in the last year, we have another new group that’s recently formed.

We have a lot of meetings and groups and opportunities and most of them are lead or headed by different people. There is some crossover, certainly, and I am involved in many things, but not all. I never felt that we should look at it as a pie that could only be cut into so many pieces, but more like an ocean in that, you could never take out enough to fill one thing to empty it.

For most people it isn’t a choice of either/or, it’s a choice of this or nothing.

When Paradox was still around and active and the two groups were very friendly, it became obvious that it was not a case of people having to choose, because people didn’t have to.

We were very careful, all of us, not to schedule things against each other and we often collaborated on events or attended each others’ gatherings.

And yet, not a lot of people attended both.

Some did. I went to most things, or at least went to nearly everything at least occasionally, from Louisville Munches to Paradox to Lexington to Elizabethtown to Indianapolis to Bloomington.

I was probably the only one who attended all those things, but there was some crossover, always.

But not as much as you would think.

It became clear that people got different things from different groups. There was no reason to feel other groups were a threat.

I am in the top percentage in terms of how much your kink absorbs your life in a sort of non-personal sense. I spend what is probably an inordinate amount of time thinking about power exchange and kinky relationships and the dynamics of this lifestyle. I socialize extensively with people who are also kinky and hardly with anyone who doesn’t at least know I am.

I go to probably a half dozen events a year, every year, and that’s not counting a run to Lexington or Cincinnati or Indianapolis for a contest or a meeting or party. Almost all traveling I do has some kink dimension to it.

And all of that is an incredibly long-winded way of saying, I wonder if more people would be like me if they had the options we have, and the freedom that I’ve been lucky enough to have in terms of other commitments and opportunities.

I know I’m a bit of an anomaly, in that in some ways I am very public, but still very private in others.

If you’ve been invited to my house, then you’re on a short list. If you have my cell number, it’s a bigger list, but you probably have it for a reason, not just because you HAVE it.

But I am clearly unusually public in how I live my life and my sexual and relationship choices.

Are there people out there who think, “Wow, I’d do that, too, if I could, if that much was available, or if I had time or energy or money.”

Or do most people think, “My kink is private and I don’t need my social life to center around it, or my whole life, for that matter…”

As often happens, this is not the blog I started to write. I even had to change the title, I was going to call it “The Fallacy of Time,” and talk about how time fools us.

I had a long list of things that I would have time to do this weekend and guess what, it’s 10pm on Sunday night and I did not do many of those things.

I did some, but not a lot. Some were bigger tasks, like getting the dining room together, figuring where things will go, where will they fit, how will they fit, trying to group like things together, that’s more time consuming than one would think.

I’m close to having dishes put away, but there’s still the living room to empty from the rest of the dining room, chairs, etc.

There are a couple of pictures to hang, a shelf and a panel to install.

Then I have to empty the kitchen of the things that go into the living room that have been there because the dining room had to be emptied and so on and so forth.

So, now I’ve not done something else while I wrote more about not having time to do all I wanted.

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2 comments to An Embarrassment of Riches

Yes, lol… i could totally picture drew standing by your bedside, concerned about how much energy the life support system was using. It was even more fun discussing who would NEVER pull the plug, and just how bad an idea it would be to leave the decision up to G.

And now time has slipped away from me too… i think i had more to say, but it will have to wait.

I’m always glad when you make it to the SIGs. Actually, I really always enjoy the SIG groups, even when I think, on the way out, “Oh, crap, I have that this afternoon, don’t I?” But I always end up having a good time.